VMware is announcing discontinuation of its third party virtual switch (vSwitch) program, and plans to deprecate the VMware vSphere APIs used by third party switches in the release following vSphere 6.5 Update 1. Subsequent vSphere versions will have the third party vSwitch APIs completely removed and third party vSwitches will no longer work.

This has no impact on existing use of third party vSwitch on supported vSphere release. It also has no impact on support already purchased from VMware or the support lifecycle for the product. For more information on the end of support for this product, see the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

The third party switch APIs will work and be supported up to vSphere 6.5 Update 1.

To assist in vSwitch migration, VMware offers a free migration tool for migrating from Nexus 1000v to VDS. In addition, VMware’s Professional Services Organization can provide services to customer to migrate from third party vSwitch to VDS.”

Virtual Networking is one of the Key components of Datacenter. If all your Critical VMs running on highly redundant & high speed SAN or Ethernet Network but if VMs can’t communicate with each other then everything is useless.
From Functioning perspective, Virtual Network in VMware is similar to Physical Networks. Like Physical networking, Virtual networking is also exercises TCP/IP stack so nothing is changed underneath.
But Virtual networking has introduced many new components or its complex terminology which is sufficient enough to confuse any new admin or anyone who is trying to familiar with VMware Networking.

In this post, I will try to make you guys familiar with VMware Networking components, Its terminology and significance of each Networking Component.”

I had the chance to get a Netvisor And Adaptive Cloud Fabric Overview by Pluribus Networks at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2017.

White box Networking has been main stream in the service provider world for some time. Plurbus has been strong in that space, but now more and more enterprise’s are looking for SDN, and exploring the White Box Networking Space. Pluribus Netvisor and Adapter Cloud Fabric is a product that can sit on these devices.

“Uila’s Application-Centric Infrastructure Monitoring Monitoring helps align business and IT Operations goals in a single product by providing IT Operations with the application visibility and correlated network, compute and storage insights for Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud-based Data Centers (such as VMWare, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Docker Container, etc.). “

Ever need to see why your developer or application owner are indicating your virtual environment is causing performance issues to their application?? Of course, it’s not VMware, but it couple be something between the virtualization layer and the application layer causing performance issues.

Sounds Great. But what does that mean? How does it work?

How do I see into my environment ?

Uila Shows real time, and backwards in time so you can click and dig in.

Then you can dig into Application Analysis to see what is causing the problem.

Once you find the problem, in this case Oracle_11g-n1 looks suspect.. You can dig farther in.

Enterprise data centers are challenged today to support cloud-native applications, drive business velocity and work within flat budgets.

Network layer is often cited as the least agile part of data center infrastructure,especially when compared to compute infrastructure. The advent of virtualization changed the server landscape and delivered operational efficiencies across management workflows via automation. Emerging cloud-native applications are expected to demand even greater agility from the underlying infrastructure.

Most data centers are built using old network architecture, a box-by-box operational paradigm that inhibits the pace of IT operations to meet the demand of modern applications and software-defined data centers. Click here for more information on the challenges.

Software-defined data center is demanding network innovation. With virtualization going mainstream, networks are required to provide visibility into virtual machines, east-west traffic across VMs, and deliver network service connectivity easily. Networks are expected to not adversely impact software-defined data center agility by mandating manual box-by-box network configuration and upgrades. Emerging cloud-native applications require rapid application and services deployment. This demands network operations to be more automated instead of relying on manual CLI and limited GUI workflows. Lastly, infrastructure budgets trends have flat-lined in most organizations. This demands an innovative approach compared to the legacy network based on proprietary hardware that increases costs.

These network demands are met by software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. Leveraging a centralized controller, the SDN networks overcome the box-by-box operational paradigm to deliver business velocity. As applications become more distributed, SDN approaches are required for networks to become agile and automated via orchestrated workflows using RESTful APIs. By leveraging open industry-standard network hardware, SDN solutions provide vendor choice and drives down costs in a flat budget environment. This cycle of innovation has been witnessed before in the server infrastructure, driven by virtualization and containers. More recently, storage infrastructure is getting transformed as well with various software-enabled architectures.

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Lets Dig in. Below is a overview of the Clos Fabric.

What are my use cases? What type of deployments support the fabric?

Who uses the product today?

How do I deploy this with my existing data center, do I need to worry about my legacy network working with Big Switch?

Single SDN Fabric for Multi-Container Ecosystems.

Containers are a new atomic unit of computing that is ideal for emerging cloud-native, distributed applications. Data center operators are evaluating various container technologies, including Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Red Hat OpenShift.

Containers offer a layer of abstraction, not unlike to what virtual machines offered when virtualization first arrived on the scene. However, Containers are lightweight in using the host footprint because they share an underlying operating system unlike a VM which hosts its own guest OS.

Containers enable micro-services based distributed applications where an application is decomposed into multiple network-connected micro-services, with each micro-service packaged in its own container. This highly-distributed application architecture leads to tremendous increase in east-west traffic compared to monolithic applications.”

What about Bare-Metal networking Support?

Container Fabric Automation, Network visibility, and Operational Simplicity, what does that mean?